Suchergebnisse

Much political thinking today, particularly that influenced by liberalism, assumes a clear distinction between the public and the private, and holds that the correct understanding of this should weigh heavily in our attitude to human goods. It is, for instance, widely held that the state may address human action in the ''public'' realm but not in the ''private.'' In Public Goods, Private Goods Raymond Geuss exposes the profound flaws of such thinking and calls for a more nuanced approach. Drawing on a series of colorful examples from the ancient world, he illustrates some of the many ways in

Neoclassical economists insist that government outlays for administration, defense, & internal security generate pure public goods that benefit all members of the community since they are completely nonrival in consumption; eg, the benefits to one citizen from a battleship in no way prevent others from having similar benefits. Hence, in studies of fiscal incidence, economists allocate all such presumed benefits at their total costs to households by some a priori formula. It is argued that the benefits from so-called pure public goods -- insofar as they exist -- are civilization itself. They are the overhead costs of the modern state, whose benefits are community life, incomes, etc. They do not enter into individual preference functions in the usual manner; allocating them as if they did involves double counting. A better procedure is to ask who pays for these public overhead expenditures, or who pays more in taxes than received in benefits such as transfer payments, food subsidies, schooling, etc. The evidence from studies of fiscal incidence in several countries indicates that the rich -- who also most enjoy the "blessings of civilization" -- generally pay for them. 4 Tables. AA.

In two recent investigations into the economic problems of externality the authors have noted in passing that the welfare or optimality conditions in the case of a consumption externality seemed identical with the welfare conditions in the case of public goods as originally stated by Samuelson.1 The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the welfare conditions for a public good are a special case of the welfare conditions for a consumption externality where a public good is defined as a good 'which all enjoy in common in the sense that each individual's consumption of such a good leads to no subtraction from any other individual's consumption of that good' (Samuelson [4]). Since the welfare conditions for a private good are also a special case of the welfare conditions for a consumption externality, it follows that we have a range of externality with the pure private good and the pure public good as polar cases.

We model the aid allocation decision where the donor government has announced that good governance is the criterion for receiving aid. Potential recipients must compete for the aid funds. The structure of the competition is important to the donor in terms of achieving good governance, and to the recipients in terms of what they receive. The leaders of potential recipient countries look at aid availability through this contest as part of the competing objectives they face - some good, some not good. The donor country prefers a contest under which the aid will only go to one country while the leaders of the receiving countries prefer that each country obtains the proportion of aid relative to its governance quality. If poverty reduction is an independent goal as well, a poverty trap may be created. With good governance as a criterion, donors may work through both bilateral and multilateral agencies.

THE PROBLEM OF GOODS WITH BOTH PUBLIC AND PRIVATE PROPERTIES HAS GENERATED A VOLUMINOUS LITERTURE SINCE SAMUELSON'S INITIAL EXPLORATIONS OF THE PROPERTIES OF PUBLIC GOODS THIRTY YEARS AGO, BUT A COMPARATIVELY RECENT DEVELOPMENT HAS INVOLVED TAKING MORE EXPLICIT ACCOUNT OF THE DIFFERENT WAYS SUCH GOODS CAN CONTRIBUTE TO UTILITY. HENCE, WITH GOODS LIKE PUBLIC PARKS OR MUSEUMS, FOR EXAMPLE, THE INDIVIDUAL'S UTILITY IS LIKELY TO BE A FUNCTION BOTH OF HIS UTILISATION OF THE FACILITIES PROVIDED AND THE QUALITY OF PROVISION. MILLWARD AND HOLTERMAN INCLUDED SOME RECOGNITION OF THIS PHENOMENON IN THEIR RESPECTIVE DISCUSSIONS OF EXTERNALITIES AND THE IDEA ALSO SURFACED, ALTHOUGH ITS IMPLICATIONS WERE NOT FULLY EXPLORED, IN AN EXCHANGE BETWEEN EVANS AND NG. MORE RECENTLY, THE IDEAS INVOLVED HAVE BEEN DEVELOPED FURTHER BY STEPHEN SHMANSKE BUT IT CAN BE ARGUED THAT EVEN HE DID NOT FULLY EXHAUST THE POTENTIALITIES OF THE APPROACH AND DID NOT SUCCEED IN RELATING HIS DISCUSSION SATISFACTORILY TO THE EARLIER LITERATURE. THE PRESENT PAPER THEREFORE ATTEMPTS TO TAKE THE ANALYSIS FURTHER BY CONSIDERING IN MORE DETAIL SOME OF ITS IMPLICATIONS, AND ON THE BASIS OF THIS DISCUSSION, TO SUGGEST A MULTI-DIMENSIONAL CATEGORIZATION OF PUBLIC, PRIVATE AND 'MIXED' GOODS WHICH IS A GENERALISATION OF THE MORE RESTRICTED CATEGORIZATIONS PROPOSED BY EARLIER WRITERS.

Pour qu'une personne ait des droits effectifs, les autres doivent avoir des devoirs. Si deux devoirs entrent en conflits ­ si la réalisation de l'un deux empêche celle d'un autre ­, il est nécessaire qu'au moins un des droits liés à ces devoirs ne soit pas valide. Ce papier défend l'idée qu'une la condition nécessaire et suffisante pour éviter de tels conflits est que tous les droits sont, ou sont réductibles à, des droits de propriété privéeˆ: droits à des objets matériels et des emplacements spatio-temporels.